Online Petitions.

The first post will discuss online petition websites like change.org or petition.parliament.uk, both these examples along with many more are great examples of how many people want change.  But how useful are they?  Petitions do allow people to have a voice bring the important issues into the peripheral view of the government.  This does allow for some level of communication between the governing bodies and the general population which is essential in a democracy. However just because it can be heard by the government, do they listen?  Out of around 24,500 petitions on, petition.parliament.uk, only 0.18% or 45 of the topics have ever been debated in parliament.  Not great, although the government regularly responds to petitions with over 10,000 signatures they are simply explaining their position rather than listening to the people.  For the few people who simply didn’t understand why the legislation was implemented, an explanation is all that is needed.  Yet for so many other who simply disagree with the original legislation and the governments explanation nothing happens, for those people it is difficult not to see petition.parliament.uk as simply a scam to the public tricking them into thinking their voices matter and when you look at how much their signatures truly counts it looks pretty glum.  On the bright sight though a petition can often cause a spark, followed by the angry voices of the mob banging on parliaments windows, metaphorically of course.  Way back in 2010 the British government planned to sell publicly owned forests in England this was met with public outrage.

A petition of around 500,000 signatures made the government rethink their position and ended up founding the Independent Panel on Forestry (IPF) whose aim is to increase and protect England’s woodland, all this was inspired by an online petition so +1 for democracy and +1 for online “activism”.  There have been a few more examples of successful petitions in Britain although many didn’t hold the same weight as woodland petition it is still important to note that sometimes petitions can help change government decisions for the better.  And sometimes for the worse as on the 18^th of October 2015 parliament needed to debate a petition that received over 100,000 signature asking for an end to all immigration into the U.K which is simply a ridiculous idea nonetheless it was debated and fortunately found to be a foolish idea.

Feel free to voice your opinion in the comments below.  Keep an eye out on Facebook and Twitter for our next post about WikiLeaks.